Lowcountry cuisine

Lowcountry cuisine is the cooking traditionally associated with the South Carolina Low Country. While it shares features with Southern cooking, its geography, economics, demographics, and culture pushed its culinary identity in a different direction from regions above the fall line. With its rich diversity of seafood from the coastal estuaries, its concentration of wealth in Charleston and Savannah, and a vibrant Carribean cuisine and African cuisine influence, Lowcountry cooking has strong parallels with New Orleans and Cajun cuisines. But Charleston never developed the enduring grand restaurant legacy that New Orleans did. And so it lacked a major resource that had helped define and promote Creole cuisine to the rest of the world.

Region

Side of the Hominy Grill in Charleston, South Carolina

There is a difference of opinion as to what exactly the South Carolina Lowcountry encompasses. The term is most frequently used to describe the coastal area of South Carolina that stretches from Pawley's Island, South Carolina to the confluence of the Savannah River at the Georgia state line. More generous accounts argue that the region extends further north and west, including all of the Atlantic Coastal Plain of South Carolina. The geography is a critical factor in distinguishing the regions's culinary identity from interior areas of the South. The rich estuary system provides an abundance of shrimp, fish, crabs, and oysters that were not available to non-coastal regions prior to refrigeration. The marshlands of South Carolina also proved conducive to growing rice, and that grain became a major part of the everyday diet.

Foods that are traditionally part of Lowcountry cuisine

Appetizers, Soups, and Salads

Benne-Oyster Soup
Cooter Soup
She-crab soup
Sweet Potato & Crab Soup
Okra Soup

Meat and Seafood

Rice

Charleston Red Rice
Perlau
Salmon and Rice

Sides

Hoppin' John
Fried Cabbage
Baked Mac-n-Cheese

References

Taylor, John Martin. Hoppin'John's Lowcountry Cooking. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
The Junior League of Charleston. Charleston Receipts. Wimmer Brothers, 1993.

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